Counts, George S. (1889–1974)

Born near Baldwin, Kansas, George Sylvester Counts reflected the values of diligence and perseverance learned at home in a life of scholarship and political activity spanning more than 5 decades. He sought to inform educators and the American public about the social foundations of schooling and to promote continuous reform of education in light of evolving social conditions. Counts demonstrated his commitment to an egalitarian democracy through political action in the American Federation of Teachers and the Labor and Liberal political parties. He is best known for asking the provocative question “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” during the Great Depression.

In the first phase of his professional and public life, Counts studied schools using social scientific methods. The second and third phases saw him promoting significant educational reform and, later, expanding the scope of his work into historical and social analyses of education, as well as public service.

Counts completed a baccalaureate at Baker University in 1911 and in 1916 a doctorate in education with a minor in sociology at the University of Chicago under Charles Hubbard Judd and Albion Small. His advanced study led him to reject the widely held belief in psychology as the predominant influence in education, favoring instead the power of the social context of schooling. Reflecting this conviction, he investigated secondary education and school boards in the 1920s before joining the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1927.

Counts's studies revealed the influence of powerful social and economic forces in American education. In The Selective Character of American Secondary Education (1922) and The Social Composition of School Boards (1927), he argued [Page 233]that the interests of upper-class elites dominated high schools and school boards, thus belying equality of opportunity, particularly for immigrant and African American children. He also believed that efforts to protect elite interests would isolate American education from changing social and economic forces.

The Great Depression brought such forces to bear on debates about American education, and Counts moved to the center of those exchanges. After study tours in the Soviet Union in 1927 and 1929, he published The Soviet Challenge to America in 1931. Impressed by Soviet efforts at social planning, he attributed the social and economic devastation of the Depression to the lack of planning in the United States. Counts became convinced that schools could help lead the society toward planning. In 1932 he criticized the Progressive Education Association for not having a social theory to guide education, and later that year, he called for schools and teachers to help foster a planned, collective economy in Dare the School Build a New Social Order? He argued that science and technology had made America an industrialized, urban, and interdependent society, but the citizenry lacked the social imagination to use effectively these products of human ingenuity. Hoping to spread his ideas to the public, Counts and several like-minded colleagues launched a journal of social and educational commentary, The Social Frontier, in 1934. Under his editorship from 1934 to 1937, the journal became the voice of the educational theory called social reconstructionism. Counts's sympathy for Soviet planning and his radical notions about schools brought strong criticism from some professional educators and the Hearst newspapers. Yet he remained true to his belief that education had to reflect evolving social conditions in order for citizens to achieve the promise of America.

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